


Anatomy

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2012 [4]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Death, Heroes, Introspection, Meta, Mild Gore, The prompt made me do it., Weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:48:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dissection of heroes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anatomy

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Анатомия](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1191966) by [EvilWinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvilWinter/pseuds/EvilWinter), [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith)



> **Prompt/er** : sin_stained_ink, Clint, Natasha, Coulson, Fury. _Some days, it's hard enough to get out alive (there are things SHIELD never tells people when they recruit them)._.  
>  **Disclaimer** : I don’t own any of the recognizable characters or settings.   
> **A/N** : This is so effing weird. I don’t even know.

+

Natasha Romanov is twenty-four years old when she stops in the middle of a crowded city square in the center of Prague.

Just stops.

There is the tickle of foreign eyes down her spine and the weight of a scope trained on her pressing down on her neck. She can feel the crosshairs, bisecting, quartering her while she still breathes.

There is someone watching her. Someone preparing to kill her.

She stops. 

She should run, but she just stops and stands there and thinks of red in her hair and on her hands, red in her ledger and on the floor of the apartment building she just left, a family of four sleeping very quietly and forever in their beds after a single, quick bite from the deadliest of spiders. 

She thinks of red that never washes out and of her reflection in the mirror, framed scarlet, and she stops. 

And waits.

She closes her eyes and imagines the weight of her killer’s gaze is an embrace, the gentle hand of her favorite handler, the man she knew only as Winter. 

She imagines.

She waits.

After a long minute of her standing stock still in the busy square, her phone rings. She answers it on reflex, little more.

“This is going to sound terribly clichéd, but…. Can you just… give me some sort of sign if you want to live? Like, raise your hand or do the mambo. Something.” 

The voice belongs to a man. A man with a sniper scope, sitting… up there, in the bell tower, she decides. It’s where she would be.

She raises her face as if to look at him, even though she can’t see him.

His breath is heavy in her ear.

“Come on,” he says, low, urgently. 

He doesn’t want to kill her. But she knows that if she drops her phone and closes her eyes, if she goes back to just waiting, he will. Because that is what he does, that is his shade of red, his doom, the language of his ledger. 

She’s too old to be twenty-four. 

“Girly,” the man speaks again, “I got a kill order on you. But you’re…”

Different? Better? Prettier? Not a monster? 

All lies, all tricks. 

What is she?

A girl made weapon, Red Room’s reddest pupil.

The Black Widow, death on red wings. 

Red, red, red. 

She is only twenty-four. 

Slowly, so slowly, she raises her hand.

+

Nick Fury still has both his eyes as he runs from a building full of Hydra goons, but he barely has any bullets left. 

The mission was supposed to be easy, in and out with their inside man switching off the cameras long enough for him to slide inside between guard rounds, get the intel and get gone.

That was the plan.

Fucking plan, he thinks, growling and shooting over his shoulder, keeping a mental tally. Three bullets left.

He skids around a corner, barely manages to get his gun back around and get off another shot in time. The guard drops dead, gun still in his hand and Nick takes a precious second to drop one of his own and grab it, hoping that it’s got more bullets than his own did. 

He straightens while he runs and doesn’t dare look behind him.

He keeps running.

He keeps running until something slams into him from the left, like a freight train, like the fucking hammer of god, slams into him and rams him into the nearest wall. Both his guns hit the ground with a clatter he doesn’t hear because the behemoth of a man that tackled him off his feet is pulling back one arm, fist curled tightly.

Nick twists at the last possible moment, avoids getting his cheekbone broken by a margin and instead takes the fist on the ear. His vision blurs and the sound of impact rings like a gong through his head. 

Something rips and tears and breaks and the next punch buries itself in his face, stabbing into his eye. He sees red and blurry shapes, feels hands on his body, hitting, hurting. The world tilts and his limbs stop working, tight against a cold surface.

For a while, everything is black. For a while after that, everything is white. 

When they turn the lights back down, he sees brown spatters on the wall. Red once, he figures, admires the torture tools on the table next to him. 

He blinks and only one of his eyes seems to work. The other one is all red and shadows. They’ll tell him, later, that it’s only a trick of his mind, this leftover blur of vision. He doesn’t know it yet, but his eye is already gone. 

There is pain, bright hot and vicious, and long periods of nothing in between. He counts the drops of blood on the walls and wait for something to change.

“Who are you?” a heavily accented voice asks, later, after more dark, more light, more pain. He is cold and hungry and half blind. His extremeties are numb and his mouth full of blood.

A man with thick glasses and a butcher’s apron smiles down at him. His teeth are rotten yellow. 

By his count, it’s been about two days since Nick missed his check in. By his count, they should have come for him by now.

The man repeats his question, voice sibilant and almost gentle.

Nick smiles and spits in his face.

Then, in the moment between the man’s angry scream and the fist heading for his ruined eye, he answers, “I’m a fucking hero, asshole.”

+

Phil feels underdressed for visiting Arlington. He’s in jeans and a shirt, but it’s probably down to his cast and bruise-mottled face, he thinks as he walks down the rows and rows of graves toward three freshly turned plots. They don’t have headstones yet. The wreaths still lie there.

He missed the funeral by hours. Intentionally. 

Coming to a halt in front of the middle grave, he throws a sloppy salute and winces as something in his back is pulled. 

“Sorry I missed the fun,” the murmurs to the wind and doesn’t wait for a sign of presence because he doesn’t believe in this shit and neither did any of the men put to rest today. His men. His team. 

Dead. Dead. Dead. 

It’s not his fault. He knows that because a lot of very good shrinks told him so. He knows it because he did everything he could and almost paid with his life, too. He knows it because Magson told him so, right before the lights went out. 

Before he died, bled out red all over Phil’s hands and thighs.

“You did good, son,” the Director said, patting him heavily on the shoulder after he woke in the field hospital to find his entire world turned upside down. “You completed the mission.”

Phil nodded, demure and grateful. It only cost him all of his men.

“I’m sorry,” he tells the dead. With his good hand he pulls a chain of metal beads over his head. He wedges his dogtags between the fingers of his shattered hand and pulls until the chain breaks.

The tags are not current. They’re old, obsolete. A reminder of his days as a marine. It was Fury who stood on the airfield the day he returned from his last tour. It was Fury who said, “How would you like to serve your country in a better way?”

It was Phil who signed the contracts and non-disclosure forms. 

He signed his name – not in red, even though he should have – signed his name and stopped being a marine in favor of becoming a shield. He couldn’t really see the difference between the two, until now. Until this: Marines don’t leave anyone behind. 

Marines don’t leave anyone behind.

But the graves at his feet are empty.

He considered burying the tags, putting something inside those deep, dark holes. Instead he squints into the light, reads the ribbon on one of the wreaths. 

_A hero lost_ , it says. 

He scatters the parts of his tags over the grass carelessly and leaves them there for the magpies. 

+

Clint doesn’t know why his target must die.

He doesn’t need to know.

Doesn’t want to know. 

He has Coulson’s voice in his ear telling him it’s okay and SHIELD’s assurances that they’re the good guys.

He doesn’t need to know more.

Doesn’t need to know how old she is, or how many freckles she has. He doesn’t need to know if she’s even has sex yet, if she really likes Hello Kitty, or if the bag was a gift. He doesn’t need to know whose daughter she is, whose girlfriend or sister. He doesn’t need to know what she’s done, might do, might help do. 

He doesn’t need to know that her name is Svetlana, or that she’s only nineteen. He doesn’t need to know all these things.

All he has to do is pull the trigger.

SHIELD said they’re the good guys.

Coulson said he deserves a chance to not be the monster.

Fury said to shoot a girl called Svetlana on a busy Moscow street and be gone before the police arrive. 

Clint doesn’t need to know why.

He doesn’t need to know what that low, sinking feeling in his gut is, or why this feels so damn familiar.

He doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t.

“Fire at will,” Coulson says and, like a good weapon, Clint does.

The red clashes horribly with the pink Hello Kitty purse and Clint is gone two minutes later.

+

Red, red, red, Natasha thinks as she watches it swirl down the drain, red, red, red, pink, clear.

The water runs hot and then cold and she stands there. Waits for the taint to lessen. Waits for the calm to come, for the voice in her ear telling her that she is one of the good ones now.

They still call her the Black Widow and they still send her to strangle men in the middle of coitus while looking them dead in the eye. 

Eventually, she stops the water and dresses herself, taking a brush out into the bedroom. She sits with her back to the bed and waits. Clint drops out of the ceiling a moment later. He holds very still for a long moment and then, slowly, sits behind her and starts untangling her wet curls. 

“Coulson told me,” he says, once he’s worked out the tips, moving upward by inches. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” she orders, sharply, without moving an inch.

Clint always apologizes after the bad missions because he thinks she’s his responsibility just because he brought her here instead of killing her. 

Her choices are her own and if she wanted to, she could still disappear. She stays. That is all he needs to know. 

He goes back to brushing, works up another inch, hits her shoulder blades. Stops.

“They asked too much,” he says. “They asked you to…”

For all that he deals in death, there is still something innocent about Clint. He puts holes in his targets, but he never undresses them with his hands, never lets them spread him open. Never lets them invade him.

That’s her job. That’s what she was taught.

She reaches over her shoulder, still his hands when he starts pulling too hard.

“It’s alright.”

“It’s fucking not alright, Tasha! I didn’t bring you here just do you could…”

Keep going as she always has. It was his promise of a chance to wipe out the red that made her follow him into the lion’s den. It was his whispers of better things that made her face down the one-eyed lion in all his fury and not falter.

“I’m doing good,” she says. “He was a bad man.”

“So what?” he asks, angrily, “Fuck a man to get close to him and then kill him with your fucking stocking and it’s okay because it’s for a good cause? That’s not…”

“We’re heroes now,” she tells him, still calm. It’s borrowed calm, lab-made calm. In Red Room, screaming never helped anyone. “Not villains. Not monsters.”

“Doesn’t make much of a difference, does it?”

She twists until she sits facing him and smiles at him, bright and open, the way she imagines Natasha might have been if there had never been a Black Widow. Happy. 

“It makes all the difference,” she says.

+

“You can be a hero, son,” the recruiter says to the kid standing in front of him, little Nicky Fury.

“A hero, Agent,” the Director tells Phil.

“Hero,” Coulson tells Hawkeye.

“Hero,” Hawkeye echoes, five years down the road, into the ear of a woman made of shades of red. 

“Hero,” Natasha reminds him, here, now. Later. After. 

Hero. 

“They should have told us what that _means_.”

She smiles at him. “Isn’t that what being a hero is?”

He brushes out her hair, one tangle after another, until it is smooth and dry and red as blood.

+


End file.
